Wikimedia Apps/Team/iOS/Retrospectives/01-26-2017

Theme

Quarterly Planning

Not ideal but satisfactory
No negative feelings
There’s not a lot of change quarter to quarter
Seems like there’s a lot of leaking over
Pacing of having one quarter on feature and one quarter on maintenance worked well, the current pace of feature/quarter is causing the slide...
- Big initial brainstorm populated roadmap and now it’s more a matter of moving things around, prioritizing them and squeezing them in where they make sense
- WWDC reveals new tech which usually influences goals over the summer

Planning on reviewing the roadmap on the quarterly boundaries, checking that priorities are right and what we’re working on is still relevant, but previously it’s been done on an as-needed basis

Maps search API dependencies were complete before work began (kind of)
- Sounds like you don’t do some things cause there’s a dependency that you can’t rely on
- API changes are not worrying. It’s the bigger things like Reading recommendation system, for example. The real dependency problems - ongoing service issues, not individual feature requests. The real thing - DR, Analytics, Marketing. Lack of infrastructural support doesn’t impact feature-level planning so much

Do you feel like you have to give teams a quarter’s notice?
- Depends. It’s difficult with entirely new things (the thumbnails convo with the Reading Web). Bigger things are hard
- Client teams take a lot of extra work.

Rate on a scale of 1 - 4

1 - High

2 - Moderate

3 - Low

4 - None

Honest 111

Empowering 221

Efficient use of time 222

Easy to follow 211

Outcomes 212

Visibility into other teams 333

What info is missing?
- Obscure - something lives on a wiki somewhere but there’s no central resource

Is the lack of visibility hurting you and your work?
- The only thing that would hurt - being able to count on the other team to deliver/own a feature.

Is there anything that you wish you had a say on?
- Wikidata discussions cause it’ll make it to iOS